Wakeboard fun in Stanley

15 May, 2017

One of my friends was surprised when she found out the other day that I had quit my job. She said based on my relatively well curated social media gallery, my life seemed golden. These accompanying images of wakeboarding in calm, quiet waters, would appear to be testament to that perceived idyllic life.

But how does not having a job, make my life anything less awesome than it is? Isn’t the beauty of life, the sheer unpredictability of it? I moved halfway across the world, to a place where I knew no one and nothing, and get ridiculed on an almost daily basis for having a funny accent when I speak the local language – no mean feat considering this is the first time being fully immersed in the Chinese language. I quit my job and I’m trying to stick to this somewhat ridiculous budget (it’s not going that well by the way), and to me, that’s what adventure is. So maybe it’s time we re-adjusted our definition of what a perfect life is – mine is one where I have no idea what’s around the corner and am perfectly happy and to content to live in a state of not knowing. And that’s what I hope is shown in my social media feed – real moments that were not planned or posed, but simply happened as a result of me living the life I intended.

Consequently, that very way of living is how I ended up shooting my friend wakeboarding this day – he’d rocked up from Mexico for business a few days prior and this is what he wanted to do. I hadn’t had to wake up before 11am for at least the last two years so asking me to be at a boat dock by 8am, at a place that takes an hour to get to, was a challenge to say the last. I got lost because I’m not a real Asian who can properly use the 16-seater mini bus system, and then I almost got squashed by several cars and buses on a stupidly narrow road before finding a shortcut that led me down a path so unused it was covered with cobwebs. Needless to say, by the time I got to the boat, I had been eaten alive, bug spray or not.

I’d also never shot action before, so I had absolutely no idea what settings I needed on my camera, as testified by the countless number of immediately deleted blurry images. But I got there in the end. I think. And it was mostly just fun to hang out on a boat again. Haven’t done that since the good old Whistler days, in that cold, but infinitely cleaner, Green Lake.